“If difficult words in official Hindi documents bring you to tears, your troubles will soon be over,” announced a report in the Hindi daily The Navbharat Times last week.

﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿Prakash Singh/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Several news organizations have announced that the government is adopting “Hinglish.”

The report publicized an order that India’s Ministry of Home Affairs has been circulating to government officials since September, asking bureaucrats to use simpler Hindi in their documents. The home ministry, in addition to protecting the country from terrorism and fighting insurgencies, is also supposed to encourage the government to use Hindi through something called the Department of Official Language.

The order said that the Hindi being used in government documents is too “pure,” meaning it’s heavy on words derived from the classical language Sanskrit. That’s hurting Hindi’s popularity, the department said.

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“Using difficult and seldom-heard words in the national language leads to a great hesitation in using the language,” said the order written by bureaucrat Veena Upadhyaya, who has since retired.

She suggested bureaucrats should write in Hindi the way people speak, “freely using popular words from other languages such as Urdu, English and regional languages.”

There’s a political history here, of course. What she’s suggesting is what Hindi has always done – in speech, that is. Colloquial Hindi traditionally has been very similar to spoken Urdu: both developed from a dialect spoken around Delhi. So in addition to Sanskrit-origin words, spoken Hindi is rich in words from Persian, Arabic, and of course, English.

But the struggle for Independence also involved making choices about language, as the college textbook ”Hindi and Urdu Since 1800” recounts. Many Indian nationalists wanted the national language to be a Hindi that more strongly invoked Sanskrit, the language that many of India’s ancient Hindu epics were written in. Given India’s linguistic variety, though, and the fact that Hindi hadn’t been used for official work, India decided the government should keep working in English but translate its work into Hindi.

Many of the newly-coined words are tongue-twisters, and aren’t used widely outside government circles. For bureaucrats, there’s help: they can take crash courses in basic and official Hindi. The Department of Official Language offers online courses so that bureaucrats “develop competence in…various forms of official correspondence and texts, like notes, orders, memoranda, applications, circulars, notifications, reports, minutes, proceedings, requisitions, reminders, press releases, communiqué.”

Eventually, they will be able to translate phrases that Indian bureaucrats must use a lot, judging by this mock test, such as “It is highly objectionable” and “Keep in abeyance.”

Rupert Snell, who is director of the Hindi-Urdu undergraduate program at the University of Texas at Austin, agreed that there is a certain lack of agility to some of official Hindi’s inventions.

But he was wary of Ms. Upadhyaya’s suggestion that people should freely use popular English words like “computer” and “Internet” when writing official documents in Hindi.

Mr. Snell wondered whether “dipping into English whenever you feel like it,” would really make Hindi easier to read for everyone – or just for English speakers who aren’t well-educated in Hindi, and perhaps don’t care to be. In many cases, he noted with concern, Hindi words that are not at all difficult to understand have been replaced with English words in everyday conversation.

That is a result of the unequal status the two languages still have. Mrinal Pande, the former editor of the Hindi-language daily Hindustan, said that as long as English is perceived to have more cachet than Hindi, people will pepper their language with English words and phrases to sound “polished.” But she’s not particularly worried about it. Hindi has always been a hybrid, she said.

“In another generation these words will probably change shape somewhat, like ‘lantern’ became ‘lalten,’” said Ms. Pande, who now heads Prasar Bharti, India’s public service broadcaster. “They’ll be rubbed along the edges and begin to be conjugated in a grammar that belongs to Hindi.”

In the meantime, if bureaucrats do adopt a great deal more English into official Hindi – what should India call this hybrid language?

Several news organizations have announced that the government is adopting Hinglish. But Hinglish is generally English that has been infused with Hindi flavor. Here, we’re talking about doing the opposite.

A piece in one Hindi-language paper suggested an alternative way to refer to such Hindi: Fangrezi.

The term borrows from the Hindi tendency to make nonsense rhymes – angrezi-fangrezi – particularly when being dismissive, a habit that carries over to Indian English as well, as in “arty-farty.” “Angrezi” is the Hindi word for the English language.

And if bureaucrats stick with the official language that has been developed by and for them, that won’t be so bad either. As one self-important word follows another in an official speech or paper, official Hindi does manage to convey quite a bit about its context and its users, suggested Mr. Snell.

“You can sort of see phalanxes of white Ambassadors charging through the streets,” he said.

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